Hearts of Iron IV - The Ultimate WWII Strategy Game

[The Brazilian Slaughter]

Basically OPMs relative to how NCR and Legion start in OWB.

Well, that's true, but OWB start-date is 2270s. Compare to FODD, which starts in 2245.

I would't say FUSA is OPM, tho. They are HUGE, they just need to win the civil war and then in two, three years they will be strong as hell. Last time I played FUSA, I abandoned the game out of boredom and switched to Enclave, which had pretty much everyone running a train on them.

To be fair to OWD, they have far less map area, althrough far more province area.

One way to weaken NCR would be to turn all states except Shady Sands into puppets of NCR, and have NCR slowly go up its tree to annex them.

 

[Stavrophore]

Vaarna_Aarne do you know any decent steam workshop downloader. Paradox are cheap cucks and their mods are undownloadable trough http://steamworkshopdownloader.com/view/809903394

I thought the slavs were resourceful.

 

[fantadomat]

Vaarna_Aarne do you know any decent steam workshop downloader. Paradox are cheap cucks and their mods are undownloadable trough http://steamworkshopdownloader.com/view/809903394

I though the slavs were resourceful.

We are,i decided to use the cs.rin.ru library,i asked to have more than one or two options for downloading in the future .

 

[janior]

why do i have 300h in this game?

 

[Space Satan]

DD air training

Spoiler

Hope you are all having a nice day. It's Wednesday, so that means it's time to roll out another dev diary. Today’s is going to be a bag of tricks diary covering several smaller features from Man the Guns and the 1.6 Ironclad free update. The large changes to naval things are occupying much of the team, so there will be a bit before I start giving you the details on that. But meanwhile, lets dip into some smaller, yet juicy features...

Faction Leadership
Being the leader of a faction comes with a much larger degree of control. Once someone controls a faction that you are in there has not really been any ways of taking over that control, except of course to leave and make your own.

With MTG we are adding a system for taking over that control, assuming you qualify:

To be able to take over leadership in the faction they are in, a country must:

• Have more than twice the deployed manpower of the faction leader (subjects count, but at varying strength depending on autonomy)
• Have more than 150% of the factories of the faction leader
• Be in every war the faction leader is currently in
• Not having capitulated already

After paying a hefty amount of political power, and then the faction is yours. The faction leader will get an alert warning them if another country is close to qualifying so they can take steps to avoid it if they want to (AI will generally play fairly nice here), but it is also possible to see candidates in the war screen at any time. Ownership can only change once every 6 months to keep things stable and predictable.

Cancelable Focuses

Sometimes you accidentally click that focus and then realize it wasn't at all what you intended, or the situation changed moments after you clicked. It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does it can be very frustrating… so with 1.6 you will no longer be locked in and can cancel a focus and pick another (with a few exceptions). Some focuses that fire off event chains or would otherwise break by being canceled half-way will still be locked in (the game will warn you in a tooltip ahead of time). To be nice to misclicks we save a few days progress, but beyond that you won't get it all back if you change your mind, so you still need to think through the choice of focus properly.

Naval and Air Exercises

With fuel added to the game and a new repair system for ships (see a diary in the misty future!) we felt that there was now an argument for letting the player exercise their ship crews and air wings as well. Before there wasn't enough ability to model cost really. This means that you will be able to tell ships and air wings to go and exercise. This works a lot like training your land forces - your forces take some damage and consume fuel while gaining experience (and also generating some global xp). Just like with land troops, exercises can only train them to a certain level. Experience level on ships is nothing new, but for air wings it is. A trained wing will be performing better, and losing planes means you will be losing experience as well. It will be up to the player to decide how much training they can afford, and this will be heavily dependent on their access to fuel. Of course experience is also gained in combat as you would expect.

That's all for us this week, see you next week!

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Finally Kwa will be able to take over the Allies. It was always kinda silly UK got to keep the leadership spot.

 

[CaffeineConquistador]

why do i have 300h in this game?

Why, indeed. Everything after Darkest Hour was shit.

 

[fantadomat]

why do i have 300h in this game?

mods? That shit is unplayable without them. My first game was playing as Bulgaria,naturally,and my ambition was the Balkans and kebab removal. I ended up becoming the Terran empire and uniting the world,bah retarded shit game.

 

[janior]

why do i have 300h in this game?

Why, indeed. Everything after Darkest Hour was shit.

tbh i recently reinstalled darkest hour, installed TGC mod and kinda forgot about this game, the only thing that DH is missing is HOTKEYS but it's managable after you get used to it

why do i have 300h in this game?

Why, indeed. Everything after Darkest Hour was shit.

snowballing in hoi4 is a massive issue, after you kill first big faction allies/axis/soviets there's no point in playing also i think mods SUCK BALLS for this game, kaiserreich was always shit imo, even in DH

 

[LizardWizard]

snowballing in hoi4 is a massive issue, after you kill first big faction allies/axis/soviets there's no point in playing also i think mods SUCK BALLS for this game, kaiserreich was always shit imo, even in DH

Kaiserreich essentially plays like vanilla but with a slightly less boring (but still boring) US and OP as fuck Austria.

Old World Blues feels like a real mod though and is more of a fallout game than F4

 

[Average Manatee]

snowballing in hoi4 is a massive issue, after you kill first big faction allies/axis/soviets there's no point in playing

Well that's kind of realistic. IRL if Axis beat Soviets the Allies would be pretty fucked and any other combination would play out similarly. The only realistic instance in which the third side can contest the blobbed enemy is an operation Unthinkable scenario where they have nukes ready and the other side would take years to obtain them even in peacetime.

Bigger problem with HoI4 is that the only difficulty is in the initial stages of war. Since the AI can't attack properly and wears itself down over time you'll never be seriously threatened past the first month or two of combat with Germany/Soviets. The only way around this is the difficulty bonuses which give the AI massive combat bonuses once you've pushed them back to their cores.

 

[mbv123]

Is the TGC good? I remember playing it years ago but found it pretty boring because Germans got immediately rekt by Entente in 1915 so no Commie revolution in Russia and Wilhelm II stayed in power for some reason. After that absolutely nothing happened and the game was static as fuck. IDK if the game bugged out or it was meant to be that way.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

why do i have 300h in this game?

Why, indeed. Everything after Darkest Hour was shit.

tbh i recently reinstalled darkest hour, installed TGC mod and kinda forgot about this game, the only thing that DH is missing is HOTKEYS but it's managable after you get used to it

why do i have 300h in this game?

Why, indeed. Everything after Darkest Hour was shit.

snowballing in hoi4 is a massive issue, after you kill first big faction allies/axis/soviets there's no point in playing also i think mods SUCK BALLS for this game, kaiserreich was always shit imo, even in DH

Stop using shit mods then.

 

[Space Satan]

DD Sea zones

Spoiler

Diary time! Today, in the 7th diary, we continue showing off features in Man the Guns, but don’t worry - there are loads more coming! The topics for today both concern access.

Sea zone access
With MTG it will now be possible for players to mark sea zones as either Avoid or Banned. A zone marked as Avoid will be treated as dangerous and, well, something to avoid if possible. This goes for all ship routing. So if enemy submarines are decimating your shipping you will be able to route it elsewhere, perhaps somewhere safer and closer to an ally. Ships will still route through a zone marked as Avoid if there is no other way to get where they are going.

A Banned zone won't allow moving through it at all, except by manual player moves, or say if it’s an invasion order triggered by the player. It will for example even shut down trading if there are no other possible paths. Zone markings are shown in the naval mapmode and can both be toggled directly on strategic area alerts, or in the new “state view” for the sea. Here we also show a proper breakdown on the level of naval supremacy in the area much like you are used to for air zones instead of the old sparse tooltip. You’ll have to excuse my sneaky censoring as not to spoil a future topic however

At this point I am sure some aspiring u-boat captains are wondering why the enemy can’t just shuffle their shipping routes constantly to avoid being located and interdicted. Changing your route will put its efficiency at 0, so if you continuously change settings you won’t be able to move things through the route. That said, there might be some good strategy in sometimes changing things up to make it harder for the enemy to concentrate their raiders.


Docking Rights
Asking for or receiving Docking Rights are new diplomatic actions. They function like military access “light” and allow someone access to base out of, resupply and repair in your naval bases. In fact military access by necessity automatically comes with docking rights. Docking rights can give you better reach and avoid troublesome paths. For example, German subs will be able to operate out of Spanish ports (if permission is granted) and threaten British shipping in areas where defending them is trickier and they won’t have to pass through the channel or more guarded waters.

When it comes to repair and such you will be at a lower priority than the owner of the port, but you will have to wait for a future dev diary for more details on how the new repair system functions in detail. Ships in a neutral port that are there due to docking rights can not be attacked with aerial strikes on the base, so if you want to get rid of ships operating there you will need to draw the harboring nation into war also.

That’s all for this time folks. Tune in next week for a *cough* explosive update.


podcat, 22 minutes ago
#1

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Well, that should at least put a stop to garrisons' ritual mass suicides, even if that has been happening notably less as of late.

Big benefit I figure is that it lets you avoid being swarmed by millions of naval bombers, or make clear and focused naval routes across expanses of open ocean.

 

[Average Manatee]

Seems like it would make protecting shipping way too easy if you just set 90% of the seazones to avoid and route everything through one line. e.g. UK has everything go straight west across the Atlantic, through Panama, then supplies India and Egypt from a standpoint basically untouchable by Germany. Shit, you can even set the Pacific to be excluded and have the route snake down past South America, ride the Antarctic, then come into India from the South. Now Japan can't do anything either.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

I don't see that being a problem at all. If you are going to prevent convoys from arriving or leaving a place, you aren't going to do that in the middle of nowhere. The route can hunker down near the South Pole as much as it wants, but if it intends to get to India or elsewhere it will have to come out of there eventually. And if you have the coverage to seal off the destination (or source) then the route doesn't matter, which is what you aim to do when you are going after convoys. UK can't ship shit to India and Egypt that way, and Japan too can achieve this by having a wall of ships cordon off the Pacific theater piece by piece.

The real importance of this IMO is that it allows you to eliminate suicidal routes (which is to say, area you have no naval and/or air control over) without manually handholding the ships.

The naval problem still remains that you can't really do much to influence naval war's outcome after the fleet (and air wings if applicable) is sent somewhere. It's all decided by production - attrition, and current quirks of ship and plane balance.

 

[Space Satan]

Egypt and Italy seas were a murder zones. I've lost count on how many ARMIES, not divisions, armies, I've lost in that shithole to strategic redeployment.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Same, and you get a lot of experience at that when one of your staples in Great War and Kaiserreich is Austria-Hungary.

I must have over some two hundred thousand dudes to ritual mass suicides by enemy warship in some Great War playthroughs. Every campaign in every mod I usually lose at least one division to sea transport.


I'm going to dance a dance of joy if they announce the option to disable automatic sea transport for armies and army groups.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Seems like pointless micro.

 

[Destroid]

Seems like it would make protecting shipping way too easy if you just set 90% of the seazones to avoid and route everything through one line. e.g. UK has everything go straight west across the Atlantic, through Panama, then supplies India and Egypt from a standpoint basically untouchable by Germany. Shit, you can even set the Pacific to be excluded and have the route snake down past South America, ride the Antarctic, then come into India from the South. Now Japan can't do anything either.

Surely there will be a cost (more convoys?) to making your routes longer.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Unnecessary, since it really doesn't matter where the route goes but what the destination and point of departure are. You can't wiggle through every choke point that lack of naval supremacy in an area would force on you. The main benefit is just avoiding stupidity like as alluded mass suicides in the Adriatic Sea.

 

[Space Satan]

Painting sea zones is something you can do when time is going by. I'd rather do it rather than wasting an army in ironman play.

 

[Average Manatee]

Seems like it would make protecting shipping way too easy if you just set 90% of the seazones to avoid and route everything through one line. e.g. UK has everything go straight west across the Atlantic, through Panama, then supplies India and Egypt from a standpoint basically untouchable by Germany. Shit, you can even set the Pacific to be excluded and have the route snake down past South America, ride the Antarctic, then come into India from the South. Now Japan can't do anything either.

Surely there will be a cost (more convoys?) to making your routes longer.

That how it works normally, but 50 or 100 more convoys up front is easily worth not losing 10 a week because your auto-routing snakes down France and west Africa to get to India or across north Africa to get to Egypt.

Plus if we're talking MP scenarios I'm guessing the others playing trying to run subs won't even be able to FIND what areas your convoys are going through.

 

[Destroid]

Seems like it would make protecting shipping way too easy if you just set 90% of the seazones to avoid and route everything through one line. e.g. UK has everything go straight west across the Atlantic, through Panama, then supplies India and Egypt from a standpoint basically untouchable by Germany. Shit, you can even set the Pacific to be excluded and have the route snake down past South America, ride the Antarctic, then come into India from the South. Now Japan can't do anything either.

Surely there will be a cost (more convoys?) to making your routes longer.

That how it works normally, but 50 or 100 more convoys up front is easily worth not losing 10 a week because your auto-routing snakes down France and west Africa to get to India or across north Africa to get to Egypt.

Plus if we're talking MP scenarios I'm guessing the others playing trying to run subs won't even be able to FIND what areas your convoys are going through.

It should probably be paired with some sort of scouting system... more air/sea dominance the more you know about what is passing through the zone. That wouldn't reflect recon flights in hostile areas but for that you'd probably need to introduce a new system.